As farmer services director with the Organic Farmers Association (OFA), Julia Barton serves transitional, organic and sustainable producers as a certifier, inspector and provider of technical services. Barton and her family operate an organic farm in Ohio.

The OFA is a membership organization for organic farmers to provide a strong national voice on organic farm issues, said Barton, who spoke recently at the USDA Ag Outlook Forum.

“Organic is a market, a label and, first and foremost for OFA farmers, it’s a movement. A global organic movement was built by organic farmers, and prior to that, indigenous producers around the world. These practices were here long before we got here, and they will be here when we are gone,” she said.

As a grassroots organization, OFA is governed and led by farmers it serves. “We also have several built-in feedback loops with farmers and farmer organizations to generate input, ideas and ways forward,” said Barton. “It’s important to OFA that farmers are leading the solutions to the challenges they experience on their farm. Their solutions are practical and most efficiently move us forward toward stronger farm viability.”

Organic farmers are the on-the-ground stewards of land as well as important stakeholders and recipients of state and federal policies and programs. Barton believes farmers can be excellent partners in identifying barriers to participating in such programs and finding solutions that work for farmers.

OFA’s Farm Bill priorities were determined through a group process involving surveys, meetings and priority setting sessions. Feedback from organic farmer work groups also influenced the process.

In discussing feedback from OFA’s NRCS work group, Barton explained that organic farmers use a variety of holistic, synergistic practices on their farms and work with nature to achieve production goals and align with NRCS.

“There are so many perfect dovetails with NRCS conservation priorities that align with organic farmers,” said Barton. “We see greater opportunities for partnerships between community partners and targeted outreach to promote and implement new programs.”

Barton referenced NRCS’s EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentive Program) Interim Practice 823, which was introduced and implemented nationwide in 2023. This systems approach to conservation was designed to “manage and improve natural resources on land in and adjacent to organic production using methods that integrate cultural, biological and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance and conserve biodiversity.”

Regarding organic farming and USDA, Barton stated that USDA must honor farmer contracts. While organic farmers who visit USDA offices sometimes feel misunderstood, there’s opportunity for continued education and learning.

“Lack of farmer contract fulfillment breaks trust and harms farmers’ credit, their bottom line, their ability to plan and their interest in working with other USDA programs,” she said.

The OFA crop insurance work group found that organic farmers are interested in crop insurance, especially because they’re already paying for this taxpayer-funded assistance.

“They are experiencing extreme and erratic weather events,” said Barton. “They lack access to appropriate programs. Some existing programs are serving some portion of organic farmers well, but many remain underserved. We are unserved by crop insurance programs.”

The work group came up with several crop insurance needs: a safety net for every farm as well as fair, functional crop insurance policies that are informed about organic production systems and requirements. “Crop insurance does not exist to help farmers make a profit,” said Barton. “It’s there to help us farm another year.”

Feedback from the work group considered the unique needs of organic production. “Organic price elections are needed so crop insurance agents and farmers can accurately reflect the crop value and meet crop rotation requirements,” said Barton. “The crops they need in the rotation are included in organic price election. There are many [elections] now, but we need more.”

Barton would like to see increased agent compensation for more complex crop insurance policies. “One is Whole Farm Revenue Protection, which is offered in every county in every state,” she said. “However, that isn’t what farmers are experiencing. There’s currently a disincentive for agents to write such policies for diversified producers because they are more complex than other policies that are straightforward.”

It’s important that contract prices are honored using a contract price addendum without artificial limits. Barton said that if a farmer can achieve a price premium for a crop product, that price should be used for the contract price addendum rather than the current “two times the conventional price of the product.”

New changes will help make crop insurance more functional for organic production. The use of enterprise units enables farms in transition or parallel production to insure portions of crops appropriately based to tailor an insurance product to what they need.

“We need to totally rework annual production history for beginning, transitioning and organic farmers,” said Barton. “They are disadvantaged within the crop insurance system. For organic farmers that must have crop rotation, it can take them 15 years to build an annual production history on a given crop.” Until farmers have that information, they’re using numbers that aren’t truly their numbers.

Other ongoing improvements include improving micro farm and whole farm revenue protection. Barton believes these are good policies that were built for diversified producers, and many producers served by OFA are highly diversified and consider their diversity to be part of their risk management system. Additional simplification of paperwork would also help make the crop insurance program more user-friendly.

There’s also a need to reduce costs related to crop diversity because diversity often results in less need for return via insurance.

Specialty crop insurance must be on equal footing with other RMA programs, and should be as easy to get, easy to work with and be coupled with fair policies. Barton mentioned the important challenge is for more agencies to understand organic agriculture and discussed the need for organic farmers to contact the OFA member hotline.

“Folks should be able to enter the web of services we offer from anywhere,” said Barton. “We should be able to connect them to all the other pieces they need to engage in. USDA should work for farmers – a farmer should be able to walk into the NRCS office or call FSA or any other program and be connected to the other resources available to them.”

by Sally Colby